This list of suggested travel books generally focuses on novels or personal histories that involve travel either directly or indirectly. You won’t find much in the way of guidebooks, though there are a couple of suggestions which lean in that direction. My choices come from multiple best travel book lists (see below for links), recommendations from other travelers and my personal favorites.

I have tried to categorize the various selections, which may have been a mistake as many of these books could logically fall into multiple categories. This is an especially common occurrence for personal stories and memoirs that also focus on an adventure, place, history, culture, etc. In those cases, I just arbitrarily selected the category I felt most appropriate. As for the order of appearance, there is absolutely no significance.

So, without further ado, here is my large selection of candidates for your reading consideration. Enjoy!

Adventures and Expeditions (19)

News from Tartary by Peter Fleming
This book describes an undeservedly successful attempt to travel overland from Peking in China to Kashmir in India. The journey took seven months and covered about 3,500 miles…With masterly understatement Peter Fleming begins this account of what is one of the true epics of adventure. With his companion, Eva Maillart, and motivated largely by curiosity, they set out across a China torn by civil war to journey through Sinkiang to British India. It had been eight years since a traveler had crossed Sinkiang; in between times those who had entered this inhospitable and politically volatile area seldom left alive. This, China’s most westerly province, was under the control of a rebel warlord supported by Stalin’s Red Army. Within it there was yet further civil war and the southern oases through which Fleming and Maillart had to travel were under the control of yet another rebel force. Entering the province by a little known and almost lethal route and following the path of the Silk Road, they ended up in Kashgar before crossing the Pamirs to India. Beautifully written and superbly observed, this is not simply a superb account of a part of the world few of us will ever see, but also a marvelous insight into the last days of the Great Game, when Britain and Russia still faced each other across a Central Asia in a state of anarchy. It is a magnificent travelogue by one of the last and greatest adventures of Empire. [Amazon.com Product Description]

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby
Feeling restless in the world of London’s high-fashion industry, Eric Newby asked a friend to accompany him on a mountain-climbing expedition in the wild and remote Hindu Kush, in north-eastern Afghanistan. And so they went—although they did stop first for four days of climbing lessons in Wales—becoming the first Englishmen to visit this spectacular region for more than half a century. Newby’s frank and funny account of their expedition to what is still amongst the world’s most isolated areas is one of the classics of travel writing. [Amazon.com Product Description]

No Mercy: A Journey into the Heart of the Congo by Redmond O’Hanlon
There are similarities between Redmond O’Hanlon’s magnificent Into The Heart of Borneo and No Mercy. In both, O’Hanlon’s keen naturalist eye notes the details (tiny scarlet flowers probed hummingbird-like by purple-red hawkmoths), his wit (usually at his own expense) remains funny, and his travel companions quite human and often endearing. He’s off on another jungle trek, this time seeking Mokele-mbembe, the alleged Congo sauropod. But No Mercy goes deeper and darker; fear and anger intrude on the levity, rationalistic thought yields to palpable fetishistic fright the deeper in they go, and O’Hanlon emerges a changed, more compassionate man. [Amazon.com Review]

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
First published more than thirty years ago, Paul Theroux’s strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey has become a modern classic of travel literature. Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia’s fabled trains—the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express—are the stars of a journey that takes him on a loop eastbound from London’s Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian. Brimming with Theroux’s signature humor and wry observations, this engrossing chronicle is essential reading for both the ardent adventurer and the armchair traveler. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara
The young Che Guevara’s lively and highly entertaining travel diary.This new, expanded edition features exclusive, unpublished photos taken by the 23-year-old Ernesto on his journey across a continent, and a tender preface by Aleida Guevara, offering an insightful perspective on the man and the icon. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
“God, he was a smart kid…” So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future–a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm–for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that Jon Krakauer’s book tries to answer. While it doesn’t—cannot—answer the question with certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about McCandless’s “Alaskan odyssey,” but also the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner’s writing on a young man who similarly disappeared in the Utah desert in the 1930s: “At 18, in a dream, he saw himself … wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams.” Into the Wild shows that McCandless, while extreme, was hardly unique; the author makes the hermit into one of us, something McCandless himself could never pull off. By book’s end, McCandless isn’t merely a newspaper clipping, but a sympathetic, oddly magnetic personality. Whether he was “a courageous idealist, or a reckless idiot,” you won’t soon forget Christopher McCandless. [Amazon.com Review]

Lost in the Jungle by Yossi Ghinsberg
Four travelers meet in Bolivia and set off into the heart of the Amazon rainforest, but what begins as a dream adventure quickly deteriorates into a dangerous nightmare, and after weeks of wandering in the dense undergrowth, the four backpackers split up into two groups. But when a terrible rafting accident separates him from his partner, Yossi is forced to survive for weeks alone against one of the wildest backdrops on the planet. Stranded without a knife, map, or survival training, he must improvise shelter and forage for wild fruit to survive. As his feet begin to rot during raging storms, as he loses all sense of direction, and as he begins to lose all hope, he wonders whether he will make it out of the jungle alive. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Size of the World by Jeff Greenwald
By the time that travel writer Jeff Greenwald hit his late thirties, he had covered more ground than Magellan, Marco Polo, and Columbus combined. But he also came to a sobering conclusion: airplanes had reduced his exotic explorations to a series of long commutes. So he set out to rediscover the mass, the gravity, and the size of the world. His mission: to circle the earth without leaving its surface.

What followed was a remarkable odyssey, as Greenwald scaled an active volcano in Guatemala, rode a rat-infested ferry across the Persian Gulf, dropped by Paul Bowles’s flat unannounced, saved a baby snow leopard in Tibet, and spent his fortieth birthday marooned in the Sahara. And no matter where he found himself, he sent reports of his exploits from his ever-faithful laptop to the screens of thousands of eager Internet readers. A pilgrimage both hilarious and harrowing, insightful and wise, The Size of the World takes you on an adventure you will never forget. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
In 1933, the delightfully eccentric travel writer Robert Byron set out on a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Teheran to Oxiana, near the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Throughout, he kept a thoroughly captivating record of his encounters, discoveries, and frequent misadventures. His story would become a best-selling travel book throughout the English-speaking world, until the acclaim died down and it was gradually forgotten. When Paul Fussell published his own book Abroad, in 1982, he wrote that The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book what “Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry.” His statements revived the public’s interest in the book, and for the first time, it was widely available in American bookstores. Now this long-overdue reprint will introduce it to a whole new generation of readers. This edition features a new introduction by Rory Stewart, best known for his book The Places In Between, about his extensive travels in Afghanistan.Today, in addition to its entertainment value, The Road to Oxiana also serves as a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now inaccessible to most Western travelers, and a nostalgic look back at a more innocent time. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff by Rosemary Mahoney
When Rosemary Mahoney, in 1998, took a solo trip down the Nile in a seven-foot rowboat, she discovered modern Egypt for herself. As a rower, she faced crocodiles and testy river currents; as a female, she confronted deeply-held beliefs about foreign women while cautiously remaining open to genuine friendship; and, as a traveler, she experienced events that ranged from the humorous to the hair-raising—including an encounter that began as one of the most frightening of her life and ended as an edifying and chastening lesson in human nature and cultural misunderstanding. Whether she’s meeting Nubians and Egyptians, or finding connections to Westerners who traveled up the Nile in earlier times—Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert among them—Mahoney’s informed curiosity about the world never ceases to captivate the reader. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Fearful Void by Geoffrey Moorhouse
“It was because I was afraid that I had decided to attempt a crossing of the great Sahara desert, from west to east, by myself and by camel. No one had ever made such a journey before …” In October 1972 Geoffrey Moorhouse began his odyssey across the Sahara from the Atlantic to the Nile, a distance of 3,600 miles. His reason for undertaking such an immense feat was to examine the roots of his fear, to explore an extremity of human experience. From the outset misfortune was never far away; and as he moved further into that ‘awful emptiness’ the physical and mental deprivation grew more intense. In March 1973, having walked the last 300 miles, Moorhouse, ill and exhausted, reached Tamanrasset, where he decided to end his journey. The Fearful Void is the moving record of his struggle with fear and loneliness and, ultimately, his coming to terms with the spiritual as well as the physical dangers of the desert. [Amazon.com Product Description]

In Trouble Again: A Journey Between Orinoco and the Amazon by Redmond O’Hanlon
O’Hanlon, traveling in a dugout canoe for four months, seeks the Yanomami tribe, reported to be the most violent people known. Given the fear of the Yanomami and the craziness of the proposed journey, he has trouble finding companions. Finally he does and this book recounts their colorful odyssey.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham
West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham–aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty–and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and ‘30s. Regarded by many as one of the best adventure books ever!“Did you read Beryl Markham’s book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer’s log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people’s stories, are absolutely true . . . I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book.”—Ernest Hemingway
[Amazon.com Product Description]

Journey Without Maps by Graham Greene
His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, Journey Without Maps is the spellbinding record of Greene’s journey. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by colonization. Western civilization had not yet impinged on either the human psyche or the social structure, and neither poverty, disease, nor hunger seemed able to quell the native spirit. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Four Corners: Into the Heart of New Guinea-One Woman’s Solo Journey by Kira Salak
A story of extraordinary danger and adventure as a very young woman attempts, alone, a trip across Papua New Guinea.After her first taste of the freedom found in travel at age nineteen, Kira Salak spent the next several years of her youth as a constant, impulsive traveler. Barely old enough to drink, she leaves her life behind-graduate school, a job, a boyfriend who loves her—to attempt the impossible, her dream of following in the footsteps of British explorer Ivan Champion, the first person to successfully cross the island of Papua New Guinea in 1927. She is motivated by something much deeper than simply wanting to be the first woman to make such a crossing, and as she composes this memoir she still searches for answers. Why would a lone traveler, a very young woman at that, want to embark on such a dangerous and mysterious trip? Where was her fear? Or was this all an attempt to court and indulge her fear for some larger purpose? No one, on the road or at home, could quite understand.

Kira Salak matches her adventures in these vivid landscapes with prose that is quite simply thrilling. More than a travel book or adventure story, Four Corners is a work of self-discovery in extreme, of being at great risk in places that are on the edge and being, most of the time, their equal. [Amazon.com Product Description]

A Time for Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube by Patrick Leigh Fermor
At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor’s book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed—through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube.At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Miles from Nowhere: A Round the World Bicycle Adventure by Barbara Savage
This is the delightful and often humorous story of an around-the-world bicycle trip taken by two young people, Barbara and Larry Savage. It took them two years and 25 countries. Along the way, these neophyte cyclists encountered warm-hearted strangers, bicycle-hating drivers, rock-throwing Egyptians, over-protective Thai policemen, and great personal joys. They returned to a new life in Santa Barbara, one Barbara never lived to savor. She was killed in a street accident, Barbara and her bicycle vs. a truck. We are lucky to have this memoir, throughout which her vitality, warmth and compassion glow. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Rucksack Man by Sebastian Snow
Beginning in 1973 in the Argentinean city of Ushuaia, Snow set out to walk the length of the Americas, from Patagonia to Alaska along the Pan-American Highway, a distance of approximately 15,000 miles. Severe health problems forced him to take a hiatus shortly after crossing the Darien Gap and Snow never completed the second half of his journey, so this book is the tale of his experiences in South America. [Wikipedia]It is unlikely that this book will end up on your reading list as it is out of print and used copies start around $US40, but read the review on Amazon and you may be persuaded it’s a worthwhile expense.

The Lost City of Z : A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
In 1925, the legendary British explorer Percy Fawcett ventured into the Amazon jungle, in search of a fabled civilization. He never returned. Over the years countless perished trying to find evidence of his party and the place he called “The Lost City of Z.” In this masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, journalist David Grann interweaves the spellbinding stories of Fawcett’s quest for “Z” and his own journey into the deadly jungle, as he unravels the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Exploration, Historical Accounts and Cultural Insights (15)

The Arabs by David Lamb
The Arabs is widely considered one of the essential books for understanding the Middle East and the peoples who live there. David Lamb, who spent years as a correspondent in Cairo, explores the Arabs’ religious, political, and cultural views, noting the differences and key similarities between the many segments of the Arab world. He explains Arab attitudes and actions toward the West, including the growth of terrorism, and situates current events in a larger historical backdrop that goes back more than a thousand years.

Now thoroughly revised and updated, The Arabs takes the story up to 2001. Lamb analyzes the developments that led to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and helps the reader to understand how things got to that point. A veteran journalist, Lamb combines his extensive experience in covering international politics with his deeply informed insider’s knowledge to provide an intimate portrait of the Arab world today. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Africans by David Lamb
During the four years he spent in black Africa as the bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, David Lamb traveled through almost every country south of the Sahara, logging more than 300,000 miles. He talked to presidents and guerrilla leaders, university professors and witch doctors. He bounced from wars to coups oceans apart, catching midnight flights to little-known countries where supposedly decent people were doing unspeakable things to one another. In the tradition of John Gunther’s Inside Africa, The Africans is an extraordinary combination of analysis and adventure. Part travelogue, part contemporary history, it is a portrait of a continent that sometimes seems hell-bent on destroying itself, and of people who are as courageous as they are long-suffering. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski
When Africa makes international news, it is usually because war has broken out or some bizarre natural disaster has taken a large number of lives. Westerners are appallingly ignorant of Africa otherwise, a condition that the great Polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuœciñski helps remedy with this book based on observations gathered over more than four decades.Kapuœciñski first went to Africa in 1957, a time pregnant with possibilities as one country after another declared independence from the European colonial powers. Those powers, he writes, had “crammed the approximately ten thousand kingdoms, federations, and stateless but independent tribal associations that existed on this continent in the middle of the nineteenth century within the borders of barely forty colonies.” When independence came, old interethnic rivalries, long suppressed, bubbled up to the surface, and the continent was consumed in little wars of obscure origin, from caste-based massacres in Rwanda and ideological conflicts in Ethiopia to hit-and-run skirmishes among Tuaregs and Bantus on the edge of the Sahara. With independence, too, came the warlords, whose power across the continent derives from the control of food, water, and other life-and-death resources, and whose struggles among one another fuel the continent’s seemingly endless civil wars. When the warlords “decide that everything worthy of plunder has been extracted,” Kapuœciñski writes, wearily, they call a peace conference and are rewarded with credits and loans from the First World, which makes them richer and more powerful than ever, “because you can get significantly more from the World Bank than from your own starving kinsmen.”

Constantly surprising and eye-opening, Kapuœciñski’s book teaches us much about contemporary events and recent history in Africa. It is also further evidence for why he is considered to be one of the best journalists at work today. [Gregory McNamee, Amazon.com review]

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
The late Bruce Chatwin carved out a literary career as unique as any writer’s in this century: his books included In Patagonia, a fabulist travel narrative, The Viceroy of Ouidah, a mock-historical tale of a Brazilian slave-trader in 19th century Africa, and The Songlines, his beautiful, elegiac, comic account of following the invisible pathways traced by the Australian aborigines. Chatwin was nothing if not erudite, and the vast, eclectic body of literature that underlies this tale of trekking across the outback gives it a resonance found in few other recent travel books. A poignancy, as well, since Chatwin’s untimely death made The Songlines one of his last books. [Amazon.com review]

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert D. Kaplan
From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare now sweeping Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the twentieth century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy.This enthralling and often chilling political travelogue fully deciphers the Balkans’ ancient passions and intractable hatreds for outsiders. For as Kaplan travels among the vibrantly-adorned churches and soul-destroying slums of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, he allows us to see the region’s history as a time warp in which Slobodan Milosevic becomes the reincarnation of a fourteenth-century Serbian martyr; Nicolae Ceaucescu is called “Drac,” or “the Devil”; and the one-time Soviet Union turns out to be a continuation of the Ottoman Empire. [Amazon.com Review]

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
A masterpiece of twentieth-century writing, Heart of Darkness exposes the tenuous fabric that holds “civilization” together and the brutal horror at the center of European colonialism. Conrad’s crowning achievement recounts Marlow’s physical and psychological journey deep into the heart of the Belgian Congo in search of the mysterious trader Kurtz. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East by Pico Iyer
Only in India would the American film Rambo be remade with the title role played by a woman–in a sari, no less! Only in Hong Kong would a man at a cocktail party pick up a woman with the line “What do you think of the dollar?” And only in Video Night in Kathmandu will you find detailed, unsettling portraits of a Far East in flux as experienced by Pico Iyer, a travel writer beyond compare. Tibet, China, India, and Thailand–these are among the objects of Iyer’s wanderlust, the subjects of 11 essays chronicling his travels. In India, he explores the lucrative Bombay film business: “The process of turning an American movie into an Indian one was not very difficult … but it did require a few changes…. the Indian hero had to be domesticated, supplied with a father, a mother, and a clutch of family complications.” As one film director told him, “ … for example, Rambo must be given a sister who was raped.” In Bangkok he finds the sex trade is well nigh impossible to avoid: “ … by the time a third official government tout approached me with the novel invitation: ‘My friend. You no like birdwatching?’ I was inclined to suspect that ornithology was not among his interests.”Pico Iyer is more than just a travel writer. For four years, he wrote about world affairs for Time, and he brings to these brilliant, comical, and poignant essays his extensive knowledge of politics and culture as well as a journalist’s eye for the telling details. Video Night in Kathmandu provides both a stark, unsettling view of modern Asia and an exploration of the ambivalent attitudes Asians hold toward the West. [Amazon.com Review]

The Tale of Murasaki: A Novel by Liza DalbyThe Tale of Murasaki is an elegant and brilliantly authentic historical novel by the author of Geisha and the only Westerner ever to have become a geisha.In the eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, the most popular work in the history of Japanese literature. In The Tale of Murasaki, Liza Dalby has created a breathtaking fictionalized narrative of the life of this timeless poet–a lonely girl who becomes such a compelling storyteller that she is invited to regale the empress with her tales. The Tale of Murasaki is the story of an enchanting time and an exotic place. Whether writing about mystical rice fields in the rainy mountains or the politics and intrigue of the royal court, Dalby breathes astonishing life into ancient Japan. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Shogun by James Clavell
This is James Clavell’s tour-de-force; an epic saga of one Pilot-Major John Blackthorne, and his integration into the struggles and strife of feudal Japan. Both entertaining and incisive, Shogun is a stunningly dramatic re-creation of a very different world. Starting with his shipwreck on this most alien of shores, the novel charts Blackthorne’s rise from the status of reviled foreigner up to the heights of trusted advisor and eventually, Samurai. All as civil war looms over the fragile country. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and ambitious civil servant, made a nine-month journey throughout America. The result was Democracy in America, a monumental study of the life and institutions of the evolving nation. Tocqueville looked to the flourishing democratic system in America as a possible model for post-revolutionary France, believing that the egalitarian ideals it enshrined reflected the spirit of the age and even divine will. His insightful work has become one of the most influential political texts ever written on America and an indispensable authority on democracy.This new edition is the only one that contains all Tocqueville’s writings on America, including the rarely-translated Two Weeks in the Wilderness, an account of Tocqueville’s travels in Michigan among the Iroquois, and Excursion to Lake Oneida. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
The astonishing saga of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s survival for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctic seas, as Time magazine put it, “defined heroism.” Alfred Lansing’s scrupulously researched and brilliantly narrated book—with over 200,000 copies sold—has long been acknowledged as the definitive account of the Endurance’s fateful trip. To write their authoritative story, Lansing consulted with ten of the surviving members and gained access to diaries and personal accounts by eight others. The resulting book has all the immediacy of a first-hand account, expanded with maps and illustrations especially for this edition. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Worst Journey in the World – Antarctic 1910-1913 by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
As Apsley Cherry-Garrard states in his introduction to the harrowing story of the Scott expedition to the South Pole, “Polar Exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.” Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World is a gripping account of an expedition gone disastrously wrong. The youngest member of Scott’s team, the author was later part of the rescue party that eventually found the frozen bodies of Scott and three men who had accompanied Scott on the final push to the Pole. These deaths would haunt Cherry-Garrard for the rest of his life as he questioned the decisions he had made and the actions he had taken in the days leading up to the Polar Party’s demise.Prior to this sad denouement, Cherry-Garrard’s account is filled with details of scientific discovery and anecdotes of human resilience in a harsh environment. Each participant in the Scott expedition is brought fully to life. Cherry-Garrard’s recollections are supported by diary excerpts and accounts from other teammates. Despite the sad fate of Scott, the reader will grudgingly agree with the closing words of The Worst Journey in the World: “Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion. And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore…. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.” [Amazon.com Review]

Farthest North: The Voyage and Exploration of the Fram, 1893–1896 by Fridtjof Nansen
In 1893 Fridtjof Nansen set off on one of the greatest journeys of exploration ever undertaken. The remarkable three-year project involved building a special ship, designed to ride out the savage pressure of the ice, to sail round the north of Russia into the Kara and Laptev Seas and then, using his intuition as to arctic currents, deliberately freeze the ship into the ice to drift towards the North Pole. From the drifting ship, Nansen and one of his men would then, using dog teams, make the last assault towards the North Pole across the pack. Characterized by Nansen’s restless and endless innovation, the expedition was to be another in the litany of heroic failures. But its advances in technique, the sheer willpower that drove Nansen and Johansen, first north from the Fram and then south across the melting pack to the uncharted mass of Franz Josef Land, using sledge and kayak, under assault from walrus and polar bear and above all the temperamental and endlessly changing ice, was to light a fire of inspiration that later carried men to both North and South Pole. The first edition of Farthest North sold 40,000 copies in English on publication. One of its reviewers puts it best: “Two things were very prominent. One was the indomitable faith of the man in himself, and the other the unanimity with which most of the best authorities believed he was going to a living grave.” Nansen had “…made the most conspicuous advance towards the Pole that has ever been made, and almost as great an advance as has been accomplished by all other voyages in the nineteenth century put together…He is a Man in a Million.” [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Journals of Captain Cook by James R. Cook
Cook led three famous expeditions to the Pacific Ocean between 1768 and 1779. In voyages that ranged from the Antarctic circle to the Arctic Sea, Cook charted Australia and the whole coast of New Zealand, and brought back detailed descriptions of the natural history of the Pacific. Accounts based on Cook’s journals were issued at the time, but it was not until this century that the original journals were published in Beaglehole’s definitive edition. The Journals tells the story of these voyages as Cook wanted it to be told, radiating the ambition, courage and skill which enabled him to carry out an unrivalled series of expeditions in dangerous waters. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz
Two centuries after James Cook’s epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to recapture the Captain’s adventures and explore his embattled legacy in today’s Pacific. Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Confederates in the Attic, works as a sailor aboard a replica of Cook’s ship, meets island kings and beauty queens, and carouses the South Seas with a hilarious and disgraceful travel companion, an Aussie named Roger. He also creates a brilliant portrait of Cook: an impoverished farmboy who became the greatest navigator in British history and forever changed the lands he touched. Poignant, probing, antic, and exhilarating, Blue Latitudes brings to life a man who helped create the global village we inhabit today. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Not So Funny When It Happened: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure by Tim Cahill
If you think you know what’s the worst than can happen while traveling, the essayists in Not So Funny When it Happened will set you straight. In over 30 scathingly funny pieces, a diverse array of authors shows just how quickly a pleasant vacation can turn into an embarrassing anecdote. In Vietnam, John Wood invents increasingly elaborate fictions to explain his ex-wife’s “accidental death” in order to avoid humiliating himself by admitting he’s divorced. Australian traveler Jayce White awakens in Zimbabwe to a baboon at his breakfast table helping himself to leftovers with primal flair. Collected in Not So Funny When it Happened, these stories and more show that when traveling, even the best of plans fall by the wayside. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Rule No. 5: No Sex on the Bus: Confessions of a Tour Leader by Brian Thacker
Brian Thacker confesses all as he reveals the best (and worst) of 20 trips as a tour leader around Europe. He tells how he fed passengers horse meat spag bol, hamburgers made from breakfast cereal and roosters’ testicles; how he left a passenger standing by the side of a motorway in France for 3 hours in his underwear clutching a purple toothbrush and how, along the way, he lost his driver, his cook, his bus, ten brightly coloured canal bikes, a large church and eventually his patience. [Amazon.com Product Description]

I’m Not Eating Any of That Foreign Muck: Travels with Me Dad by Brian Thacker
In a quest to grow closer with his father, this adventurous author drags his 72-year-old dad, Harry Thacker, off the couch and halfway around the world to exotic locations such as Gibraltar, Sri Lanka, Malta, and Singapore as well as to the not-so-exotic places in England from Harry’s upbringing. Harry’s fear of eating “foreign muck” is quickly forgotten as the pair embark on their travels and, along the way, Brian learns more about his father—including why Harry lost two fingers on his right hand and where he picked up his inexhaustible supply of awful jokes. What results is an honest and hilarious recollection of the bond between father and son—and of lives enriched by travel. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Sleeping Around: A Couch Surfing Tour of the Globe by Brian Thacker
What sort of person offers up their couch to a complete stranger from the other side of the world? And how can said stranger be sure that the owner of the couch is not a weirdo? Intrigued by this fast-growing phenomenon, inveterate traveler and author Brian Thacker sets out on a couch surfing tour of the globe to discover how and why kipping on someone’s floor has become the latest, hippest way to travel. So grab your passport, strap yourself in, and join Brian as he travels through the Americas, Africa, India, Iceland and everywhere in between, sleeping on floors and sofas, under drum kits and in wardrobes, and hangs out with some of the most charming, entertaining, and off-the-wall people you could hope—or perhaps hope not—to ever meet. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Thong Also Rises: Further Misadventures from Funny Women on the Road (Travelers’ Tales Guides)
Too many travel guides are dry lists of attractions or portentous histories of a place. This isn’t the case with The Thong Also Rises. Hot on the (high) heels of Sand in My Bra and Whose Panties Are These? comes this collection of the best in women’s travel and humor writing. These Ms-adventures take readers around the world and back again—and they’ll be happy to be reading rather than experiencing some of these adventures. Subjects include learning how to go to the bathroom with a pig in Thailand, trying to explain that sex toy to customs while Mother is watching, attending naked wedding ceremonies on Valentine’s Day in Jamaica, conquering that consuming fear of wooden puppets with a visit to Prague, boarding a crusty old Soviet Bomber in Laos, and more. Contributors include such notable writers and comedians as Jill Connor Browne, Wanda Sykes, Laurie Notaro, Wendy Dale, and Ayun Halliday. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Kiss the Sunset Pig by Laurie Gough
In this lyrical, poetic, and charmingly funny book, Laurie Gough drives from Ontario to California reflecting on a life spent travelling in search of new experiences and familiar sensations. Heading towards a half-remembered cave on the Pacific coast where her younger, more adventurous self once stayed, she recalls adventures in Sumatra, the Yukon and many places in between and wonders what compels her to keep moving through life while everyone else has found a place to belong. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Lifestyle Related (2)

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts
Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life—from six weeks to four months to two years—to discover and experience the world on your own terms. Veteran shoestring traveler Rolf Potts shows how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel. Potts gives the necessary information on: financing your travel time; determining your destination; adjusting to life on the road; working and volunteering overseas; handling travel adversity; and re-assimilating back into ordinary life. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton
Aside from love, few activities seem to promise us as much happiness as going traveling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs, and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel, few people seem to talk about why we should go and how we can become more fulfilled by doing so. In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, explores what the point of travel might be and modestly suggests how we can learn to be a little happier in our travels. [From the Inside Flap]

Memoirs, Personal Stories and Reflective Writing (22)

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author is poised to garner yet more adoring fans. [Amazon.com Product Description]

360 Degrees Longitude: One Family’s Journey Around the World by John Higham
After more than a decade of planning, John Higham and his wife September bid their high-tech jobs and suburban lives good-bye, packed up their home and set out with two children, ages eight and eleven, to travel around the world. In the course of the next 52 weeks they crossed 24 time zones, visited 28 countries and experienced a lifetime of adventures.Making their way across the world, the Highams discovered more than just different foods and cultures; they also learned such diverse things as a Chilean mall isn’t the best place to get your ears pierced, and that elephants appreciate flowers just as much as the next person. But most importantly, they learned about each other, and just how much a family can weather if they do it together. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Skating to Antarctica by Jenny Diski
Jenny Diski’s obsession with the cool purity of white began early in life, when as a small child, she was taken for weekly skating lessons at the local ice rink. This gleaming, immaculate ice stands in stark contrast to Diski’s dark and emotionally fraught home life with two abusive parents. Skating to Antarctica is an unusual blend of travel essay and personal memoir, one that uses the phases of a physical journey to trace the trajectory of the inner life. Both journeys begin for Diski when her 18-year-old daughter Chloe decides to search for the maternal grandmother she has never met. It has been 30 years since Diski last saw her mother, and she has no desire to find her; is it merely coincidence that she books her passage to Antarctica shortly after Chloe begins the hunt?Weaving painful memories of a childhood spent entangled in her parents’ vicious sexual psychodramas and an adolescence in and out of mental wards into an account of her slow journey south, Diski imbues both voyages of discovery with a resonance that comes largely from twinning these tales. [Amazon.com Review]

The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers by Eric Hansen
Eric Hansen survives a cyclone on a boat off the Australian coast, cradles a dying man in Calcutta, and drinks mind-altering kava in Vanuatu. He helps a widower search for his wife’s wedding ring amid plane-crash wreckage in Borneo and accompanies topless dancers on a bird-watching expedition in California. From the Maldives to Sacramento, from Cannes to Washington Heights, Eric Hansen has a way of getting himself into the most sacred ceremonies and the most candid conversations. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Travellers’ Tales: Stories from the ABC’s Foreign Correspondents by Trevor Borman
The ABC’s foreign correspondents around the world report on global events – from war zones and areas of famine, flood and disaster – natural and man-made – they bring an incisive and objective perspective to an Australian audience. Just as ‘Foreign Correspondent’ gives correspondents latitude to cover stories not normally given news and current affairs air-time, as well as room to report in greater depth, the pieces in Travellers’ Tales allow the journalists to write about events and places they know well from a personal point of view. From September 11 in New York to the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Jerusalem, from mercenaries in Sierra Leone to Princess Anne on a camel in Mongolia, whether they are amusing anecdotes or provide a new angle on an already famous international event, Travellers’ Tales showcases the talents of the ABC’s renowned foreign correspondents, past and present. [Harper Collins Book Description]

Marching Powder by Thomas McFadden, Rusty Young
Rusty Young was backpacking in South America when he heard about Thomas McFadden, a convicted English drug trafficker who ran tours inside Bolivia’s notorious San Pedro prison. Intrigued, the young Australian journalist went to La Paz and joined one of Thomas’s illegal tours. They formed an instant friendship and then became partners in an attempt to record Thomas’s experiences in the jail. Rusty bribed the guards to allow him to stay and for the next three months he lived inside the prison, sharing a cell with Thomas and recording one of the strangest and most compelling prison stories of all time. The result is Marching Powder.This book establishes that San Pedro is not your average prison. Inmates are expected to buy their cells from real estate agents. Others run shops and restaurants. Women and children live with imprisoned family members. It is a place where corrupt politicians and drug lords live in luxury apartments, while the poorest prisoners are subjected to squalor and deprivation. Violence is a constant threat, and sections of San Pedro that echo with the sound of children by day house some of Bolivia’s busiest cocaine laboratories by night. In San Pedro, cocaine—“Bolivian marching powder”—makes life bearable. Even the prison cat is addicted.

Yet Marching Powder is also the tale of friendship, a place where horror is countered by humor and cruelty and compassion can inhabit the same cell. This is cutting-edge travel-writing and a fascinating account of infiltration into the South American drug culture. [Amazon.com Product Description]

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s, remains one of his most beloved works. Since Hemingway’s personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now this new special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author intended it to be published. This restored edition brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the unbridled creativity and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized. [Amazon.com Product Description]

I Dreamed of Africa by Kuki Gallman
This autobiography tells the story of an Italian woman whose life is driven by love of Africa. The prologue covers a string of deaths which shaped Kuki Gallmann’s life including that of a woman friend who died in a car crash. The widower, Paulo (who then married Kuki), his two daughters and Kuki’s son by a previous marriage all went to Kenya and bought a large estate. Paulo died in an accident and Kuki’s son died aged 17, bitten by one of his own puff-adders. Kuki had a couple of affairs—one with a married white planter, another with a film stuntman who involved her in the film “Out of Africa”. Finally she set up a foundation which in fact is more like a private wildlife park. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
With his dog Charley, John Steinbeck set out in his truck to explore and experience America in the 1960s. As he talked with all kinds of people, he sadly noted the passing of region speech, fell in love with Montana, and was appalled by racism in New Orleans. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
The Innocents Abroad is the classic travel narrative of American literature. Written in Mark Twain’s unmistakable voice, this refreshing look at the Old World by a traveler from the New is recommended reading for everyone with an interest in travel and the globe at large. The book chronicles Twain’s pleasure cruise on board the chartered vessel Quaker City through Europe and the Holy Land with a group of religious pilgrims. It was the best selling of Twain’s works during his lifetime. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slavomir Rawicz
In 1941, the author and six fellow prisoners of war escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk—a camp where enduring hunger, cold, untended wounds, and untreated illnesses, and avoiding daily executions were everyday feats. Their march—over thousands of miles by foot—out of Siberia, through China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India is a remarkable statement about man’s desire to be free. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn
Hemingway is, of course, the unnamed “other” in the title of this tart memoir, first published in 1979, in which Gellhorn describes her globe-spanning adventures, both accompanied and alone. With razor-sharp humor and exceptional insight into place and character, she tells of a tense week spent among dissidents in Moscow; long days whiled away in a disused water tank with hippies clustered at Eilat on the Red Sea; and her journeys by sampan and horse to the interior of China during the Sino-Japanese War.Now including a foreward by Bill Buford and photographs of Gellhorn with Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Gary Cooper, and others, this new edition rediscovers the voice of an extraordinary woman and brings back into print an irresistibly entertaining classic. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest—to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign by Pico Iyer
One of the best travel writers now at work in the English language brings back the sights and sounds from a dozen different frontiers. A cryptic encounter in the perfumed darkness of Bali; a tour of a Bolivian prison, conducted by an enterprising inmate; a nightmarish taxi ride across southern Yemen, where the men with guns may be customs inspectors or revolutionaries—these are just three of the stops on Pico Iyer’s latest itinerary.But the true subject of Sun After Dark is the dislocations of the mind in transit. And so Iyer takes us along to meditate with Leonard Cohen and talk geopolitics with the Dalai Lama. He navigates the Magritte-like landscape of jet lag, “a place that no human had ever been until forty or so years ago.” And on every page of this poetic and provocative book, he compels us to redraw our map of the world. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Places In Between by Rory Stewart
In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers’ floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion—a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan’s first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following.Through these encounters—by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny—Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map’s countless places in between. [Amazon.com Product Description]

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfillment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American dream. A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac’s exhilarating novel defined the new ‘Beat‘ generation. It had tremendous impact on both sides of the Atlantic and made him famous overnight. [Amazon.com Product Description]

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee
“I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese. I was excited, vainglorious, knowing I had far to go; but not, as yet, how far. As I left home that morning and walked away from the sleeping village, it never occurred to me that others had done this before me.” Despite this romantic and optimistic opening, what Lee finds and describes is the most primitive and feudal country in Europe, a peninsula for the most part untouched by the modern world, a land of labor without dignity, a church devoid of compassion, and a country ripe for revolutionary change. There is humor here, and love, and adolescent awakening, but beneath the smoothly written surface is a foreboding sense of a savage future, a premonition that a war will come, which will not end soon. For Lee, as for much of the world, 1936 was the end of innocence, a fateful year when “it was being learned again that men needed more than courage, anger, slogans, convictions, or even a just cause when they went to war.” Thus Lee, innocently but inexorably, becomes entangled in the passionate, violent, and bloody struggle that was the Spanish Civil War. Along with Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Lee’s sequel to Cider with Rosie is a singular document, written with the excitement and wonder of a twenty-year-old, but infused with the wisdom of a young adult who sees what lies ahead and is capable of conveying to the reader how bad it will be. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Beach by Alex Garland
The Khao San Road, Bangkok—first stop for the hordes of rootless young Westerners traveling in Southeast Asia. On Richard’s first night there, in a low-budget guest house, a fellow traveler slashes his wrists, bequeathing to Richard a meticulously drawn map to “the Beach.”The Beach, as Richard has come to learn, is the subject of a legend among young travelers in Asia: a lagoon hidden from the sea, with white sand and coral gardens, freshwater falls surrounded by jungle, plants untouched for a thousand years. There, it is rumored, a carefully selected international few have settled in a communal Eden.

Haunted by the figure of Mr. Duck—the name by which the Thai police have identified the dead man—and his own obsession with Vietnam movies, Richard sets off with a young French couple to an island hidden away in an archipelago forbidden to tourists. They discover the Beach, and it is as beautiful and idyllic as it is reputed to be. Yet over time it becomes clear that Beach culture, as Richard calls it, has troubling, even deadly, undercurrents.

Spellbinding and hallucinogenic, The Beach is a look at a generation in their twenties, who, burdened with the legacy of the preceding generation and saturated by popular culture, long for an unruined landscape, but find it difficult to experience the world firsthand. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
Shocking his stodgy colleagues at the exclusive Reform Club, enigmatic Englishman Phileas Fogg wagers his fortune, undertaking an extraordinary and daring enterprise: to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days. With his French valet Passepartout in tow, Verne’s hero traverses the far reaches of the earth, all the while tracked by the intrepid Detective Fix, a bounty hunter certain he is on the trail of a notorious bank robber. [From the Inside Flap]

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
In this book, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives; of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom; of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her; of primitive festivals; of big game that were her near neighbors—lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes—and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Walden by Henry David Thoreaux
One of the great books of American letters and a masterpiece of reflective philosophizing. Accounts of Thoreau’s daily life on the shores of Walden Pond outside Concord, Massachusetts, are interwoven with musings on the virtues of self-reliance and individual freedom, on society, government, and other topics. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Novels (9)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel by Dai SijieBalzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is an enchanting tale that captures the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening. An immediate international bestseller, it tells the story of two hapless city boys exiled to a remote mountain village for re-education during China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. There the two friends meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, the two friends find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe by her wealthy Aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to determine her own fate, does not hesitate to turn down two eligible suitors. She then finds herself irresistibly drawn to Gilbert Osmond, who, beneath his veneer of charm and cultivation, is cruelty itself. A story of intense poignancy, Isabel’s tale of love and betrayal still resonates with modern audiences. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hossein
Amir and Hassan are childhood friends in the alleys and orchards of Kabul in the sunny days before the invasion of the Soviet army and Afghanistan’s decent into fanaticism. Both motherless, they grow up as close as brothers, but their fates, they know, are to be different. Amir’s father is a wealthy merchant; Hassan’s father is his manservant. Amir belongs to the ruling caste of Pashtuns, Hassan to the despised Hazaras.This fragile idyll is broken by the mounting ethnic, religious, and political tensions that begin to tear Afghanistan apart. An unspeakable assault on Hassan by a gang of local boys tears the friends apart; Amir has witnessed his friend’s torment, but is too afraid to intercede. Plunged into self-loathing, Amir conspires to have Hassan and his father turned out of the household.

When the Soviets invade Afghanistan, Amir and his father flee to San Francisco, leaving Hassan and his father to a pitiless fate. Only years later will Amir have an opportunity to redeem himself by returning to Afghanistan to begin to repay the debt long owed to the man who should have been his brother.

Compelling, heartrending, and etched with details of a history never before told in fiction, The Kite Runner is a story of the ways in which we’re damned by our moral failures, and of the extravagant cost of redemption. [From the Inside Flap]

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan’s most celebrated geisha.Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men’s solicitude and the money that goes with it.

In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl’s virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction—at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful—and completely unforgettable. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David RobertsShantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear.Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombay’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.

As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city’s poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power.

Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas—this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart. Based on the life of the author, it is by any measure the debut of an extraordinary voice in literature. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Paris in the twenties: Pernod, parties and expatriate Americans, loose-living on money from home. Jake is wildly in love with Brett Ashley, aristocratic and irresistibly beautiful, but with an abandoned, sensuous nature that she cannot change. When the couple drifts to Spain to the dazzle of the fiesta and the heady atmosphere of the bullfight, their affair is strained by new passions, new jealousies, and Jake must finally learn that he will never possess the woman he loves. Powerful, intense, visually magnificent, The Sun Also Rises is the novel which established Ernest Hemingway as a writer of genius. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy’s debut novel is a modern classic that has been read and loved worldwide. Equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama, it is the story of an affluent Indian family forever changed by one fateful day in 1969. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevokably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest. Lush, lyrical, and unnerving, The God of Small Things is an award-winning landmark that started for its author an esteemed career of fiction and political commentary that continues unabated. [Amazon.com Product Description]

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
A classic novel about the misperceptions and misunderstandings that illustrate the divide between East and West, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India is a masterpiece of twentieth century English fiction, and an important text for anyone interested in understanding the British involvement in colonial India. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Sheltering Sky by Paul BowlesThe Sheltering Sky is a landmark of twentieth-century literature. In this intensely fascinating story, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans’ incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures.A story about three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky explores the limits of humanity when it touches the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Place Focused Writing (13)

In Patagonia by Bruce ChatwinIn Patagonia is Bruce Chatwin’s exquisite account of his journey through “the uttermost part of the earth,” that stretch of land at the southern tip of South America, where bandits were once made welcome and Charles Darwin formed part of his “survival of the fittest” theory. Chatwin’s evocative descriptions, notes on the odd history of the region, and enchanting anecdotes make In Patagonia an exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land. An instant classic upon publication in 1977, In Patagonia remains a masterwork of literature. [Amazon.com Product Description]

City of Djinns by William Dalrymple
Sparkling with irrepressible wit, City of Djinns peels back the layers of Delhi’s centuries-old history, revealing an extraordinary array of characters along the way-from eunuchs to descendants of great Moguls. With refreshingly open-minded curiosity, William Dalrymple explores the seven “dead” cities of Delhi as well as the eighth city-today’s Delhi. Underlying his quest is the legend of the djinns, fire-formed spirits that are said to assure the city’s Phoenix-like regeneration no matter how many times it is destroyed. Entertaining, fascinating, and informative, City of Djinns is an irresistible blend of research and adventure. [Amazon.com Product Description]

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. His previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods. In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as a continent, and a place with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather, and the most peculiar and lethal wildlife to be found on the planet. The result is a deliciously funny, fact-filled, and adventurous performance by a writer who combines humor, wonder, and unflagging curiosity.Despite the fact that Australia harbors more things that can kill you in extremely nasty ways than anywhere else, including sharks, crocodiles, snakes, even riptides and deserts, Bill Bryson adores the place, and he takes his readers on a rollicking ride far beyond that beaten tourist path. Wherever he goes he finds Australians who are cheerful, extroverted, and unfailingly obliging, and these beaming products of land with clean, safe cities, cold beer, and constant sunshine fill the pages of this wonderful book. Australia is an immense and fortunate land, and it has found in Bill Bryson its perfect guide. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer
Originally published in 1953, this adventure classic recounts Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer’s 1943 escape from a British internment camp in India, his daring trek across the Himalayas, and his happy sojourn in Tibet, then, as now, a remote land little visited by foreigners. Warmly welcomed, he eventually became tutor to the Dalai Lama, teenaged god-king of the theocratic nation. The author’s vivid descriptions of Tibetan rites and customs capture its unique traditions before the Chinese invasion in 1950, which prompted Harrer’s departure. A 1996 epilogue details the genocidal havoc wrought over the past half-century. [Amazon.com Review]

Arabian Sands by Wilfred ThesigerArabian Sands is Wilfred Thesiger’s record of his extraordinary journey through the parched “Empty Quarter” of Arabia. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Thesiger was repulsed by the softness and rigidity of Western life—“the machines, the calling cards, the meticulously aligned streets.” In the spirit of T. E. Lawrence, he set out to explore the deserts of Arabia, traveling among peoples who had never seen a European and considered it their duty to kill Christian infidels. His now-classic account is invaluable to understanding the modern Middle East. [Amazon.com Product Description]

A Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux
Henri Michaux notes his impressions of India, the Himalayas, southern India, Ceylon, Malaya, China, and Japan.

Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia by Tom Bissell
In 1996, Tom Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a naïve Peace Corps volunteer. Though he lasted only a few months before illness and personal crisis forced him home, Bissell found himself entranced by this remote land. Five years later he returned to explore the shrinking Aral Sea, destroyed by Soviet irrigation policies. Joining up with an exuberant translator named Rustam, Bissell slips more than once through the clutches of the Uzbek police as he makes his often wild way to the devastated sea.In Chasing the Sea, Bissell combines the story of his travels with a beguiling chronicle of Uzbekistan’s striking culture and long history of violent subjugation by despots from Jenghiz Khan to Joseph Stalin. Alternately amusing and sobering, this is a gripping portrait of a fascinating place, and the debut of a singularly gifted young writer. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown by Paul Theroux
In Dark Star Safari the wittily observant and endearingly irascible Paul Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry, and train. In the course of his epic and enlightening journey, he endures danger, delay, and dismaying circumstances.Gauging the state of affairs, he talks to Africans, aid workers, missionaries, and tourists. What results is an insightful meditation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people, and “a vivid portrayal of the secret sweetness, the hidden vitality, and the long-patient hope that lies just beneath the surface” (Rocky Mountain News). In a new postscript, Theroux recounts the dramatic events of a return to Africa to visit Zimbabwe. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Iron & Silk by Mark Salzman
Salzman captures post-cultural revolution China through his adventures as a young American English teacher in China and his shifu-tudi (master-student) relationship with China’s foremost martial arts teacher. [Amazon.com Product Description]

A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
In this witty and warm-hearted account, Peter Mayle tells what it is like to realize a long-cherished dream and actually move into a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the remote country of the Lubéron with his wife and two large dogs. He endures January’s frosty mistral as it comes howling down the Rhône Valley, discovers the secrets of goat racing through the middle of town, and delights in the glorious regional cuisine. A Year in Provence transports us into all the earthy pleasures of Provençal life and lets us live vicariously at a tempo governed by seasons, not by days. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Cities of Gold by Douglas Preston
This riveting true story recounts the author’s journey on horseback across Arizona and New Mexico, retracing Coronado’s desperate search for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. First published in 1992, this classic adventure tale reveals the Southwest as it was when Europeans first saw it and shows how much, and how little, it has changed. “The great myth of the American West,” Preston writes, “is that there was a winning of it.” [Amazon.com Product Description]

River Townby Peter Hessler
In the heart of China’s Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that take place when one is immersed in a radically different society.Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Presentby Peter Hessler
From the acclaimed author of River Town comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of twenty-first-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world.A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. That sense of time—the contrast between past and present, and the rhythms that emerge in a vast, ever-evolving country—is brilliantly illuminated by Peter Hessler in Oracle Bones, a book that explores the human side of China’s transformation.

Hessler tells the story of modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world as seen through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In addition to the author, an American writer living in Beijing, the narrative follows Polat, a member of a forgotten ethnic minority, who moves to the United States in search of freedom; William Jefferson Foster, who grew up in an illiterate family and becomes a teacher; Emily, a migrant factory worker in a city without a past; and Chen Mengjia, a scholar of oracle-bone inscriptions, the earliest known writing in East Asia, and a man whose tragic story has been lost since the Cultural Revolution. All are migrants, emigrants, or wanderers who find themselves far from home, their lives dramatically changed by historical forces they are struggling to understand.

Peter Hessler excavates the past and puts a remarkable human face on the history he uncovers. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Things to Do / Places to Go (7)

1,000 Places to See Before You Die: A Traveler’s Life List by Patricia Schultz
Around the world, continent by continent, here is the best the world has to offer: 1,000 places guaranteed to give travelers the shivers. Sacred ruins, grand hotels, wildlife preserves, hilltop villages, snack shacks, castles, festivals, reefs, restaurants, cathedrals, hidden islands, opera houses, museums, and more. Each entry tells exactly why it’s essential to visit. Then come the nuts and bolts: addresses, websites, phone and fax numbers, best times to visit. Stop dreaming and get going. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World by Celeste Brash, Roz Hopkins (Editor)
The world is a breathtakingly big place, and in this big book we have undertaken the big task of detailing as much of it as we can – every single country, many of the larger dependencies and other, smaller destinations. With the traveler’s experience at its heart, this book shows a slice of life in every corner of the globe, and all points in between, engaging the reader’s senses in an adventure which conjures up the sights, smells, tastes, sounds and feel of our amazing world. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 of the World’s Greatest Trips by National Geographic
No one knows the world like National Geographic—and in this lavish volume, we reveal our picks for the world’s most fabulous journeys, along with helpful information for readers who want to try them out.Compiled from the favorite trips of National Geographic’s travel writers, Journeys of a Lifetime spans the globe to highlight the best of the world’s most famous and lesser known sojourns. It presents an incredible diversity of possibilities, from ocean cruises around Antarctica to horse treks in the Andes. Every continent and every possible form of transport is covered.

A timely resource for the burgeoning ranks of active travelers who crave adventurous and far-flung trips, Journeys of a Lifetime provides scores of creative ideas: trekking the heights of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania… mountain biking in Transylvania… driving through the scenic highlands of Scotland… or rolling through the outback on Australia’s famous Ghan train… and dozens of other intriguing options all over the world. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Make The Most Of Your Time On Earth: 1000 Ultimate Travel Experiences by Rough Guides
Perfect for both the seasoned traveler and the armchair dreamer, this book brings you the very best travel experiences – extraordinary landscapes, jaw-dropping architecture, white-knuckle adventures and tranquil hangouts. Want adventure? Try trekking to the source of the Ganges or exploring the lost island cities of Mozambique. Looking for an unusual place to stay? How about sleeping in a yurt in Inner Mongolia or an old prison in Latvia? For amazing wildlife, why not look for lemurs in Madagascar or spy dinosaur prints in Bolivia? And don’t forget the world’s most spectacular parties, including the Gnaoua festival in Morocco or Trinidad Carnival. Whether you want to ponder art in Melbourne or eat eels in the Neretva Delta, there’s all manner of travel experiences to keep those feet itching. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Lonely Planet 1000 Ultimate Experiences
Want to know where to discover a spectacular tropical paradise? How about journeying to the world’s greatest natural wonders, or taking the road trip of a lifetime? 1000 Ultimate Experiences brings together 1000 ideas, places and activities sure to inspire and entertain. Make your own list, hit the road, and start ticking off places you’ve always wanted to see and things you’ve always wanted to do. Who knows where you’ll end up! [Amazon.com Product Description]

Where To Go When (Eyewitness Travel Guides) by Joseph Rosendo
Answering the difficult questions that today’s adventurous travelers ask – where’s the best place for a beach holiday in March? What are my options if June is the only time I can take a holiday? I’m getting married in November, where would be the perfect place for a honeymoon? – this is the perfect book for anyone planning a vacation or a longer adventure. Find out about the best time to go to each destination, the best places to see, and the best things to do. Whatever you want to do, you can – and in any month of the year. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Travel Tips (2)

The Smart Traveler’s Passport: 399 Tips from Seasoned Travelers by Erik TorkellsThe Smart Traveler’s Passport is a collection of 399 of the best travel tips you’ll ever read, compiled from the pages of Budget Travel magazine. You’ll learn: 13 different uses for Ziploc bags; How dental floss can double as a tape measure; Where to find the best street food in cities worldwide; How a digital camera can help you find your rental car; Why clearing your Web browser’s cache will lead to lower prices on airfare and hotel reservations; How to avoid long lines at the world’s most popular attractions. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel by Joshua Piven
If you have to leave home, TAKE THIS BOOK! The team that brought you The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook now helps you navigate the perils of travel. Learn what to do when the tarantula crawls up your leg, the riptide pulls you out to sea, the sandstorms headed your way, or your camel just won’t stop. Find out how to pass a bribe, remove leeches, climb out of a well, survive a fall onto subway tracks, catch a fish without a rod, and preserve a severed limb. Hands-on, step-by-step instructions show you how to survive these and dozens of other adventures. An appendix of travel tips, useful phrases, and gestures to avoid will also ensure your safe return. Because you just never know… [Amazon.com Product Description]

Travel Writing (4)

Travel Writing: See the World. Sell the Story by L. Peat O’Neil
Travel writing is a lucrative and enjoyable writer’s market, and this book may be your ticket. While planning your getaway, consider getting this book to prepare your pen—before packing your bags. You may find vacations becoming your vocation! [Amazon.com review]

A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration (Travelers’ Tales Guides) by Michael Shapiro
Great writers inspire readers to head out in search of foreign sunsets, but in this instance, they inspired travel writer Michael Shapiro to head out for the great writers themselves. A Sense of Place is one writer’s journey to visit all the heroes who have motivated him—to pack a pen and toothbrush, to find out where they live, why they chose the place, and how it influences their writing. In each scene, readers, writers, and travelers are given a glimpse of the locale and surroundings of the writer: Simon Winchester’s Massachusetts, Redmond O’Hanlon’s London, Jan Morris’s Wales, or Frances Mayes’s Tuscany. But then it’s left up to the writers themselves to situate the reader and describe their lives, their craft, and their remarkable world, which they do with living room intimacy. The result is engaging, illuminating, and transporting for writers and travelers alike. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Summing Up by W. Somerset MaughamThe Summing Up represents Maugham’s life and philosophy in his own words. It is autobiographical in nature, though most of the work is concerned with Maugham’s unique and fascinating opinions on the theatre, writing, metaphysics and the interesting people he encountered in his long and successful career. His style is very conversational and you feel yourself settling into an intellectual odyssey led by a man who lived life to its fullest. Sixty years after The Summing Up was published, Maugham’s controversial insights and opinions continue to stimulate conversation and debate. This is one of the most entertaining, self-revealing pieces of all time. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations from One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer (Travelers’ Tales Guides) by Rolf Potts
Marco Polo Didn’t Go There is a collection of rollicking travel tales from a young writer USA Today has called “Jack Kerouac for the Internet Age.” For the past ten years, Rolf Potts has taken his keen postmodern travel sensibility into the far fringes of five continents for such prestigious publications as National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, and The New York Times Magazine. This book documents his boldest, funniest, and most revealing journeys—from getting stranded without water in the Libyan desert, to crashing the set of a Leonardo DiCaprio movie in Thailand, to learning the secrets of Tantric sex in a dubious Indian ashram.Marco Polo Didn’t Go There is more than just an entertaining journey into fascinating corners of the world. The book is a unique window into travel writing, with each chapter containing a “commentary track”—endnotes that reveal the ragged edges behind the experience and creation of each tale. Offbeat and insightful, this book is an engrossing read for students of travel writing as well as armchair wanderers. [Amazon.com Product Description]

Bonus (3)

A View of the World: Selected Journalism by Norman Lewis
Includes the piece of journalism Norman was most proud of, an article on the devastation of Amerindian populations in Brazil, which resulted in the establishment of Survival International, which campaigns to protect tribal people and their environments. Travel writing that makes you laugh, but also brings home the world’s hurt in glorious understatement. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerates “The Contents of Some Travelers’ Bags” and exposes “Writers Who Wrote about Places They Never Visited”; tracks extreme journeys in “Travel as an Ordeal” and highlights some of “Travelers’ Favorite Places.” Excerpts from the best of Theroux’s own work are interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected. The Tao of Travel is a unique tribute to the pleasures and pains of travel in its golden age. [Amazon.com Product Description]

The Book of Marvels: An Explorer’s Miscellany by Mark Collins Jenkins
In centuries past, undertaking a journey meant a voyage into the unknown, traveling for months or years into unexplored areas on the map where cartographers could only speculate “There be dragons.” And those fortunate adventurers who made it home again always had fantastical tales to tell—even if sometimes they stretched the truth up to and beyond the breaking point.This eclectic history of exploration sweeps from antiquity to the 1800s, encompassing ages when new marvels might be waiting over the next hill or a new world just over the horizon. Among others, we meet Marco Polo, the 13th-century Venetian whose extravagant accounts of distant Cathay were mainly true; Sir John Mandeville, less intrepid explorer than shameless exaggerator; and John Wesley Powell, braving Colorado River rapids on the first trip through the Grand Canyon.

We visit dozens of places around the globe captured in the words, images, and maps of their discoverers. Each page unfolds its wonders in gorgeous profusion that delights the eye and dazzles the imagination. [Amazon.com Product Description]

My name is Jeff Blum. I am a digital nomad that has been slow traveling the globe since March 09, 2009 (2,337 days.). Along the way I have learned a few tips that I hope to share with you on this site.